In Memory of JFK: The First U.S. President to be Declared a Terrorist and Threat to National Security

 November 22, 2021

By Cynthia Chung for the Saker Blog

In April 1954, Kennedy stood up on the Senate floor to challenge the Eisenhower Administration’s support for the doomed French imperial war in Vietnam, foreseeing that this would not be a short-lived war.^[1]

In July 1957, Kennedy once more took a strong stand against French colonialism, this time France’s bloody war against Algeria’s independence movement, which again found the Eisenhower Administration on the wrong side of history. Rising on the Senate floor, two days before America’s own Independence Day, Kennedy declared:

“The most powerful single force in the world today is neither communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile – it is man’s eternal desire to be free and independent. The great enemy of that tremendous force of freedom is called, for want of a more precise term, imperialism – and today that means Soviet imperialism and, whether we like it or not, and though they are not to be equated, Western imperialism. Thus, the single most important test of American foreign policy today is how we meet the challenge of imperialism, what we do to further man’s desire to be free. On this test more than any other, this nation shall be critically judged by the uncommitted millions in Asia and Africa, and anxiously watched by the still hopeful lovers of freedom behind the Iron Curtain. If we fail to meet the challenge of either Soviet or Western imperialism, then no amount of foreign aid, no aggrandizement of armaments, no new pacts or doctrines or high-level conferences can prevent further setbacks to our course and to our security.”^[2]

In September 1960, the annual United Nations General Assembly was held in New York. Fidel Castro and a fifty-member delegation were among the attendees and had made a splash in the headlines when he decided to stay at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem after the midtown Shelburne Hotel demanded a $20,000 security deposit. He made an even bigger splash in the headlines when he made a speech at this hotel, discussing the issue of equality in the United States while in Harlem, one of the poorest boroughs in the country.

Kennedy would visit this very same hotel a short while later, and also made a speech:

“Behind the fact of Castro coming to this hotel, [and] Khrushchev…there is another great traveler in the world, and that is the travel of a world revolution, a world in turmoil…We should be glad [that Castro and Khrushchev] came to the United States. We should not fear the twentieth century, for the worldwide revolution which we see all around us is part of the original American Revolution.”^[3]

What did Kennedy mean by this? The American Revolution was fought for freedom, freedom from the rule of monarchy and imperialism in favour of national sovereignty. What Kennedy was stating, was that this was the very oppression that the rest of the world wished to shake the yoke off, and that the United States had an opportunity to be a leader in the cause for the independence of all nations.

On June 30th, 1960, marking the independence of the Republic of Congo from the colonial rule of Belgium, Patrice Lumumba, the first Congolese Prime Minister gave a speech that has become famous for its outspoken criticism of colonialism. Lumumba spoke of his people’s struggle against “the humiliating bondage that was forced upon us… [years that were] filled with tears, fire and blood,” and concluded vowing “We shall show the world what the black man can do when working in liberty, and we shall make the Congo the pride of Africa.”

Shortly after, Lumumba also made clear, “We want no part of the Cold War… We want Africa to remain African with a policy of neutralism.”^[4]

As a result, Lumumba was labeled a communist for his refusal to be a Cold War satellite for the western sphere. Rather, Lumumba was part of the Pan-African movement that was led by Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah (who later Kennedy would also work with), which sought national sovereignty and an end to colonialism in Africa.

Lumumba “would remain a grave danger,” Dulles said at an NSC meeting on September 21, 1960, “as long as he was not yet disposed of.”^[5] Three days later, Dulles made it clear that he wanted Lumumba permanently removed, cabling the CIA’s Leopoldville station, “We wish give [sic] every possible support in eliminating Lumumba from any possibility resuming governmental position.”^[6]

Lumumba was assassinated on Jan. 17th, 1961, just three days before Kennedy’s inauguration, during the fog of the transition period between presidents, when the CIA is most free to tie its loose ends, confident that they will not be reprimanded by a new administration that wants to avoid scandal on its first days in office.

Kennedy, who clearly meant to put a stop to the Murder Inc. that Dulles had created and was running, would declare to the world in his inaugural address on Jan. 20th, 1961, “The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.”

La Resistance

Along with inheriting the responsibility of the welfare of the country and its people, Kennedy was to also inherit a secret war with communist Cuba run by the CIA.

The Bay of Pigs set-up would occur three months later. Prouty compares the Bay of Pigs incident to that of the Crusade for Peace; the Bay of Pigs being orchestrated by the CIA, and the Crusade for Peace sabotaged by the CIA, in both cases to ruin the U.S. president’s (Eisenhower and Kennedy) ability to form a peaceful dialogue with Khrushchev and decrease Cold War tensions. Both presidents’ took onus for the events respectively, despite the responsibility resting with the CIA. However, Eisenhower and Kennedy understood, if they did not take onus, it would be a public declaration that they did not have any control over their government agencies and military.

Further, the Bay of Pigs operation was in fact meant to fail. It was meant to stir up a public outcry for a direct military invasion of Cuba.

On public record is a meeting (or more aptly described as an intervention) with CIA Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell, Joint Chiefs Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer, and Navy Chief Admiral Burke basically trying to strong-arm President Kennedy into approving a direct military attack on Cuba. Admiral Burke had already taken the liberty of positioning two battalions of Marines on Navy destroyers off the coast of Cuba “anticipating that U.S. forces might be ordered into Cuba to salvage a botched invasion.”^[7] (This incident is what inspired the Frankenheimer movie “Seven Days in May.”)

Kennedy stood his ground.

“They were sure I’d give in to them,” Kennedy later told Special Assistant to the President Dave Powers. “They couldn’t believe that a new president like me wouldn’t panic and try to save his own face. Well they had me figured all wrong.”^[8]

Incredibly, not only did the young president stand his ground against the Washington war hawks just three months into his presidential term, but he also launched the Cuba Study Group which found the CIA to be responsible for the fiasco, leading to the humiliating forced resignation of Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell and Charles Cabell. (For more on this refer to my report.)

Unfortunately, it would not be that easy to dethrone Dulles, who continued to act as head of the CIA, and key members of the intelligence community such as Helms and Angleton regularly bypassed McCone (the new CIA Director) and briefed Dulles directly.^[9]

But Kennedy was also serious about seeing it through all the way, and vowed to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”

* * *

There is another rather significant incident that had occurred just days after the Bay of Pigs, and which has largely been overshadowed by the Cuban fiasco in the United States.

From April 21-26th, 1961, the Algiers putsch or Generals’ putsch, was a failed coup d’état intended to force President de Gaulle (1959-1969) not to abandon the colonial French Algeria. The organisers of the putsch were opposed to the secret negotiations that French Prime Minister Michel Debré had started with the anti-colonial National Liberation Front (FLN).

On January 26th, 1961, just three months before the attempted coup d’état, Dulles sent a report to Kennedy on the French situation that seemed to be hinting that de Gaulle would no longer be around, “A pre-revolutionary atmosphere reigns in France… The Army and the Air Force are staunchly opposed to de Gaulle…At least 80 percent of the officers are violently against him. They haven’t forgotten that in 1958, he had given his word of honor that he would never abandon Algeria. He is now reneging on his promise, and they hate him for that. de Gaulle surely won’t last if he tries to let go of Algeria. Everything will probably be over for him by the end of the year—he will be either deposed or assassinated.”^[10]

The attempted coup was led by Maurice Challe, whom de Gaulle had reason to conclude was working with the support of U.S. intelligence, and Élysée officials began spreading this word to the press, which reported the CIA as a “reactionary state-within-a-state” that operated outside of Kennedy’s control.^[11]

Shortly before Challe’s resignation from the French military, he had served as NATO commander in chief and had developed close relations with a number of high-ranking U.S. officers stationed in the military alliance’s Fontainebleau headquarters.^[12]

In August 1962 the OAS (Secret Army Organization) made an assassination attempt against de Gaulle, believing he had betrayed France by giving up Algeria to Algerian nationalists. This would be the most notorious assassination attempt on de Gaulle (who would remarkably survive over thirty assassination attempts while President of France) when a dozen OAS snipers opened fire on the president’s car, which managed to escape the ambush despite all four tires being shot out.

After the failed coup d’état, de Gaulle launched a purge of his security forces and ousted General Paul Grossin, the chief of SDECE (the French secret service). Grossin was closely aligned with the CIA, and had told Frank Wisner over lunch that the return of de Gaulle to power was equivalent to the Communists taking over in Paris.^[13]

In 1967, after a five-year enquête by the French Intelligence Bureau, it released its findings concerning the 1962 assassination attempt on de Gaulle. The report found that the 1962 assassination plot could be traced back to the NATO Brussels headquarters, and the remnants of the old Nazi intelligence apparatus. The report also found that Permindex had transferred $200,000 into an OAS bank account to finance the project.

As a result of the de Gaulle exposé, Permindex was forced to shut down its public operations in Western Europe and relocated its headquarters from Bern, Switzerland to Johannesburg, South Africa, it also had/has a base in Montreal, Canada where its founder Maj. Gen. Louis M. Bloomfield (former OSS) proudly had his name amongst its board members until the damning de Gaulle report. The relevance of this to Kennedy will be discussed shortly.

As a result of the SDECE’s ongoing investigation, de Gaulle made a vehement denunciation of the Anglo-American violation of the Atlantic Charter, followed by France’s withdrawal from the NATO military command in 1966. France would not return to NATO until April 2009 at the Strasbourg-Kehl Summit.

In addition to all of this, on Jan. 14th, 1963, de Gaulle declared at a press conference that he had vetoed British entry into the Common Market. This would be the first move towards France and West Germany’s formation of the European Monetary System, which excluded Great Britain, likely due to its imperialist tendencies and its infamous sin City of London.

Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson telegrammed West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer directly, appealing to him to try to persuade de Gaulle to back track on the veto, stating “if anyone can affect Gen. de Gaulle’s decision, you are surely that person.”

Little did Acheson know that Adenauer was just days away from signing the Franco-German Treaty of Jan 22nd, 1963 (also known as the ÉlyséeTreaty), which had enormous implications. Franco-German relations, which had long been dominated by centuries of rivalry, had now agreed that their fates were aligned. (This close relationship was continued to a climactic point in the late 1970s, with the formation of the European Monetary System, and France and West Germany’s willingness in 1977 to work with OPEC countries trading oil for nuclear technology, which was sabotaged by the U.S.-Britain alliance.

The Élysée Treaty was a clear denunciation of the Anglo-American forceful overseeing that had overtaken Western Europe since the end of WWII.

On June 28th, 1961, Kennedy wrote NSAM #55. This document changed the responsibility of defense during the Cold War from the CIA to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and would have (if seen through) drastically changed the course of the war in Vietnam. It would also have effectively removed the CIA from Cold War military operations and limited the CIA to its sole lawful responsibility, the collecting and coordination of intelligence.

By Oct 11th, 1963, NSAM #263, closely overseen by Kennedy^[14], was released and outlined a policy decision “to withdraw 1,000 military personnel [from Vietnam] by the end of 1963” and further stated that “It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel by 1965.” The Armed Forces newspaper Stars and Stripes had the headline U.S. TROOPS SEEN OUT OF VIET BY ’65.

It would be the final nail in the coffin.

Treason in America

“Treason doth never prosper; what is the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”

– Sir John Harrington

By Germany supporting de Gaulle’s exposure of the international assassination ring, his adamant opposition to western imperialism and the role of NATO, and with a young Kennedy building his own resistance against the imperialist war of Vietnam, it was clear that the power elite were in big trouble.

On November 22nd, 1963 President Kennedy was brutally murdered in the streets of Dallas, Texas in broad daylight.

With the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, likely ordained by the CIA, on Nov. 2nd, 1963 and Kennedy just a few weeks later, de facto President Johnson signed NSAM #273 on Nov. 26th, 1963 to begin the reversal of Kennedy’s policy under #263. And on March 17th, 1964, Johnson signed NSAM #288 that marked the full escalation of the Vietnam War and involved 2,709,918 Americans directly serving in Vietnam, with 9,087,000 serving with the U.S. Armed Forces during this period.

The Vietnam War would continue for another 12 years after Kennedy’s death, lasting a total of 20 years for Americans, and 30 years if you count American covert action in Vietnam.

Two days before Kennedy’s assassination, a hate-Kennedy handbill was circulated in Dallas accusing the president of treasonous activities including being a communist sympathizer.

On November 29th, 1963 the Warren Commission was set up to investigate the murder of President Kennedy.

The old Congressman Hale Boggs of Louisiana was a member of that Warren Commission. Boggs became increasingly disturbed by the lack of transparency and rigour exhibited by the Commission and became convinced that many of the documents used to incriminate Oswald were in fact forgeries.

In 1965 Rep. Boggs told New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison that Oswald could not have been the one who killed Kennedy.^[15] It was Boggs who encouraged Garrison to begin the only law enforcement prosecution of the President’s murder to this day.

Nixon was inaugurated as President of the United States on Jan 20th, 1969. Hale Boggs soon after called on Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell to have the courage to fire J. Edgar Hoover.^[16]

It wasn’t long thereafter that the private airplane carrying Hale Boggs disappeared without a trace.

Jim Garrison was the District Attorney of New Orleans from 1962 to 1973 and was the only one to bring forth a trial concerning the assassination of President Kennedy. In Jim Garrison’s book “On the Trail of the Assassins”, J. Edgar Hoover comes up several times impeding or shutting down investigations into JFK’s murder, in particular concerning the evidence collected by the Dallas Police Department, such as the nitrate test Oswald was given and which exonerated him, proving that he never shot a rifle the day of Nov 22nd, 1963.

However, for reasons only known to the government and its investigators this fact was kept secret for 10 months.^[17] It was finally revealed in the Warren Commission report, which inexplicably didn’t change their opinion that Oswald had shot Kennedy.

Another particularly damning incident was concerning the Zapruder film that was in the possession of the FBI and which they had sent a “copy” to the Warren Commission for their investigation. This film was one of the leading pieces of evidence used to support the “magic bullet theory” and showcase the direction of the headshot coming from behind, thus verifying that Oswald’s location was adequate for such a shot.

During Garrison’s trial on the Kennedy assassination (1967-1969) he subpoenaed the Zapruder film that for some peculiar reason had been locked up in some vault owned by Life magazine (the reader should note that Henry Luce the owner of Life magazine was in a very close relationship with the CIA). This was the first time in more than five years that the Zapruder film was made public. It turns out the FBI’s copy that was sent to the Warren Commission had two critical frames reversed to create a false impression that the rifle shot was from behind.

When Garrison got a hold of the original film it was discovered that the head shot had actually come from the front. In fact, what the whole film showed was that the President had been shot from multiple angles meaning there was more than one gunman.

When the FBI was questioned about how these two critical frames could have been reversed, they answered self-satisfactorily that it must have been a technical glitch…

There is also the matter of the original autopsy papers being destroyed by the chief autopsy physician, James Humes, to which he even testified to during the Warren Commission, apparently nobody bothered to ask why…

This would explain why the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), reported in a July 1998 staff report their concern for the number of shortcomings in the original autopsy, that “One of the many tragedies of the assassination of President Kennedy has been the incompleteness of the autopsy record and the suspicion caused by the shroud of secrecy that has surrounded the records that do exist.” [emphasis added]

The staff report for the Assassinations Records Review Board contended that brain photographs in the Kennedy records are not of Kennedy’s brain and show much less damage than Kennedy sustained.

There is a lot of spurious effort to try to ridicule anyone who challenges the Warren Commission’s official report as nothing but fringe conspiracy theory. And that we should not find it highly suspect that Allen Dulles, of all people, was a member and pretty much leader of said commission. The reader should keep in mind that much of this frothing opposition stems from the very agency that perpetrated crime after crime on the American people, as well as abroad. When has the CIA ever admitted guilt, unless caught red-handed? Even after the Church committee hearings, when the CIA was found guilty of planning out foreign assassinations, they claimed that they had failed in every single plot or that someone had beaten them to the punch, including in the case of Lumumba.

The American people need to realise that the CIA is not a respectable agency; we are not dealing with honorable men. It is a rogue force that believes that the ends justify the means, that they are the hands of the king so to speak, above government and above law. Those at the top such as Allen Dulles were just as adamant as Churchill about protecting the interests of the power elite, or as Churchill termed it, the “High Cabal.”

Interestingly, on Dec. 22nd, 1963, just one month after Kennedy’s assassination, Harry Truman published a scathing critique of the CIA in The Washington Post, even going so far as to state “There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position [as a] free and open society, and I feel that we need to correct it.”^[18]

The timing of such a scathing quote cannot be stressed enough. Dulles, of course, told the public not to be distressed, that Truman was just in entering his twilight years.

In addition, Jim Garrison, New Orleans District Attorney at the time, who was charging Clay Shaw as a member of the conspiracy to kill Kennedy, besides uncovering his ties to David Ferrie who was found dead in his apartment days before he was scheduled to testify, also made a case that the New Orleans International Trade Mart (to which Clay Shaw was director), the U.S. subsidiary of Permindex, was linked to Kennedy’s murder. Col. Clay Shaw was an OSS officer during WWII, which provides a direct link to his knowing Allen Dulles.

Garrison did a remarkable job with the odds he was up against, and for the number of witnesses that turned up dead before the trial…

This Permindex link would not look so damning if we did not have the French intelligence SDECE report, but we do. And recall, in that report Permindex was caught transferring $200,000 directly to the bankroll of the OAS which attempted the 1962 assassination on de Gaulle.

Thus, Permindex’s implication in an international assassination ring is not up for debate. In addition, the CIA was found heavily involved in these assassination attempts against de Gaulle, thus we should not simply dismiss the possibility that Permindex was indeed a CIA front for an international hit crew.

In fact, among the strange and murderous characters who converged on Dallas in Nov. 1963 was a notorious French OAS commando named Jean Souetre, who was connected to the plots against President de Gaulle. Souetre was arrested in Dallas after the Kennedy assassination and expelled to Mexico, not even kept for questioning.^[19]

What Does the Future Hold?

After returning from Kennedy’s Nov. 24th funeral in Washington, de Gaulle and his information minister Alain Peyrefitte had a candid discussion that was recorded in Peyrefitte’s memoire “C’était de Gaulle,” the great General was quoted saying:

“What happened to Kennedy is what nearly happened to me… His story is the same as mine. … It looks like a cowboy story, but it’s only an OAS [Secret Army Organization] story. The security forces were in cahoots with the extremists.

…Security forces are all the same when they do this kind of dirty work. As soon as they succeed in wiping out the false assassin, they declare the justice system no longer need be concerned, that no further public action was needed now that the guilty perpetrator was dead. Better to assassinate an innocent man than to let a civil war break out. Better an injustice than disorder.

America is in danger of upheavals. But you’ll see. All of them together will observe the law of silence. They will close ranks. They’ll do everything to stifle any scandal. They will throw Noah’s cloak over these shameful deeds. In order to not lose face in front of the whole world. In order to not risk unleashing riots in the United States. In order to preserve the union and to avoid a new civil war. In order to not ask themselves questions. They don’t want to know. They don’t want to find out. They won’t allow themselves to find out.”

The American people would do well to remember that it was first John F. Kennedy, acting as the President to the United States, who was to be declared a terrorist and threat to his country’s national security.

Thus is it not natural that those who continue to defend the legacy of Kennedy should be regarded today as threat, not truly to the nation’s security, but a threat to the very same grouping responsible for Kennedy’s death and whom today have now declared open war on the American people.

This will be the greatest test the American people have ever been confronted with, and it will only be through an understanding of how the country came to where it is today that there can be sufficient clarity as to what the solutions are, which are not to be found in another civil war. To not fall for the trapping of further chaos and division, the American people will only be able to rise above this if they choose to ask those questions, if they choose to want to know, to want to find out the truth of things they dared not look at in the past for fear of what it would reveal.

“Whenever the government of the United States shall break up, it will probably be in consequence of a false direction having been given to public opinion. This is the weak point of our defenses, and the part to which the enemies of the system will direct all their attacks. Opinion can be so perverted as to cause the false to seem true; the enemy, a friend, and the friend, an enemy; the best interests of the nation to appear insignificant, and the trifles of moment; in a word, the right the wrong, the wrong the right. In a country where opinion has sway, to seize upon it, is to seize upon power. As it is a rule of humanity that the upright and well-intentioned are comparatively passive, while the designing, dishonest, and selfish are the most untiring in their efforts, the danger of public opinion’s getting a false direction is four-fold, since few men think for themselves.”

-James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851(

We must dare to be among the few who think for ourselves.

---

The author can be reached at https://cynthiachung.substack.com/

1. David Talbot, “The Devil’s Chessboard,” pg 304 ↑
2. Ibid, pg 305 ↑
3. Ibid, pg 295 ↑
4. Ibid, pg 319 ↑
5. Ibid, pg 319 ↑
6. Ibid, pg 319 ↑
7. Ibid, pg 337 ↑
8. Ibid, pg 337 ↑
9. Ibid, pg 359 ↑
10. Ibid, pg 350 ↑
11. Ibid, pg 353 ↑
12. Ibid, pg 347 ↑
13. Ibid, pg 354 ↑
14. L. Fletcher Prouty, “The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy,” pg xxxiv ↑
15. Anton Chaitkin’s paper “Hoover’s FBI and Anglo-American Dictatorship” ↑
16. New York Times, April 6, 1971, “Boggs Demands That Hoover Quit,” p. 1. ↑
17. Jim Garrison’s “On the Trail of the Assassins” p. 116 ↑
18. David Talbot, “The Devil’s Chessboard,” pg 201 ↑
19. Ibid, pg 422 ↑

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The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!

The world according to Vladimir Putin

 October 23, 2021

Russian president, in Sochi, lays down the law in favor of conservatism – says the woke West is in decline

By Pepe Escobar, posted with permission and first posted at Asia Times

The plenary session is the traditional highlight of the annual, must-follow Valdai Club discussions – one of Eurasia’s premier intellectual gatherings.

Vladimir Putin is a frequent keynote speaker. In Sochi this year, as I related in a previous column, the overarching theme was “global shake-up in the 21st century: the individual, values and the state.”

Putin addressed it head on, in what can already be considered one of the most important geopolitical speeches in recent memory (a so-far incomplete transcript can be found here) – certainly his strongest moment in the limelight. That was followed by a comprehensive Q&A session (starting at 4:39:00).

Predictably, assorted Atlanticists, neocons and liberal interventionists will be apoplectic. That’s irrelevant. For impartial observers, especially across the Global South, what matters is to pay very close attention to how Putin shared his worldview – including some very candid moments.

Right at the start, he evoked the two Chinese characters that depict “crisis” (as in “danger”) and “opportunity,” melding them with a Russian saying: “Fight difficulties with your mind. Fight dangers with your experience.”

This elegant, oblique reference to the Russia-China strategic partnership led to a concise appraisal of the current chessboard:

The re-alignment of the balance of power presupposes a redistribution of shares in favor of rising and developing countries that until now felt left out. To put it bluntly, the Western domination of international affairs, which began several centuries ago and, for a short period, was almost absolute in the late 20th century, is giving way to a much more diverse system.

That opened the way to another oblique characterization of hybrid warfare as the new modus operandi:

Previously, a war lost by one side meant victory for the other side, which took responsibility for what was happening. The defeat of the United States in the Vietnam War, for example, did not make Vietnam a “black hole.” On the contrary, a successfully developing state arose there, which, admittedly, relied on the support of a strong ally. Things are different now: No matter who takes the upper hand, the war does not stop, but just changes form. As a rule, the hypothetical winner is reluctant or unable to ensure peaceful post-war recovery, and only worsens the chaos and the vacuum posing a danger to the world.

A disciple of Berdyaev

In several instances, especially during the Q&A, Putin confirmed he’s a huge admirer of Nikolai Berdyaev. It’s impossible to understand Putin without understanding Berdyaev (1874-1948), who was a philosopher and theologian – essentially, a philosopher of Christianity.

In Berdyaev’s philosophy of history, the meaning of life is defined in terms of the spirit, compared with secular modernity’s emphasis on economics and materialism. No wonder Putin was never a Marxist.

For Berdyaev, history is a time-memory method through which man works toward his destiny. It’s the relationship between the divine and the human that shapes history. He places enormous importance on the spiritual power of human freedom.

Nikolai Berdyaev. Photo: Center for Sophiological Studies

Putin made several references to freedom, to family – in his case, of modest means – and to the importance of education; he heartily praised his apprenticeship at Leningrad State University. In parallel, he absolutely destroyed wokeism, transgenderism and cancel culture promoted “under the banner of progress.”

This is only one among a series of key passages:

We are surprised by the processes taking place in countries that used to see themselves as pioneers of progress. The social and cultural upheavals taking place in the United States and Western Europe are, of course, none of our business; we don’t interfere with them. Someone in the Western countries is convinced that the aggressive erasure of whole pages of their own history – the “reverse discrimination” of the majority in favor of minorities, or the demand to abandon the usual understanding of such basic things as mother, father, family or even the difference between the sexes – that these are, in their opinion, milestones of the movement toward social renewal.

So a great deal of his 40 minute-long speech, as well as his answers, codified some markers of what he previously defined as “healthy conservatism”:

Now that the world is experiencing a structural collapse, the importance of sensible conservatism as a basis for policy has increased many times over, precisely because the risks and dangers are multiplying and the reality around us is fragile.

Switching back to the geopolitical arena, Putin was adamant that “we are friends with China. But not against anyone.”

Geoeconomically, he once again took time to engage in a masterful, comprehensive – even passionate – explanation of how the natural gas market works, coupled with the European Commission’s self-defeating bet on the spot market, and why Nord Stream 2 is a game-changer.

Afghanistan

During the Q&A, scholar Zhou Bo from Tsinghua University addressed one of the key, current geopolitical challenges. Referring to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, he pointed out that, “if Afghanistan has a problem, the SCO has a problem. So how can the SCO, led by China and Russia, help Afghanistan?”

Putin stressed four points in his answer:

• The economy must be restored;
• The Taliban must eradicate drug trafficking;
• The main responsibility should be assumed “by those who had been there for 20 years” – echoing the joint statement  after the meeting between the extended troika and the Taliban in Moscow on Wednesday; and
• Afghan state funds should be unblocked.

He also mentioned, indirectly, that the large Russian military base in Tajikistan is not a mere decorative prop.

Putin went back to the subject of Afghanistan during the Q&A, once again stressing that NATO members should not “absolve themselves from responsibility.”

He reasoned that the Taliban “are trying to fight extreme radicals.” On the “need to start with the ethnic component,” he described Tajiks as accounting for 47% of the overall Afghan population – perhaps an over-estimation but the message was on the imperative of an inclusive government.

He also struck a balance: As much as “we are sharing with them [the Taliban] a view from the outside,” he made the point that Russia is “in contact with all political forces” in Afghanistan – in the sense that there are contacts with former government officials like Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah and also Northern Alliance members, now in the opposition, who are self-exiled in Tajikistan.

Those pesky Russians

Now compare all of the above with the current NATO circus in Brussels, complete with a new “master plan to deter the growing Russian threat.”

No one ever lost money underestimating NATO’s capacity to reach the depths of inconsequential stupidity. Moscow does not even bother to talk to these clowns anymore: as Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has pointed out, “Russia will no longer pretend that some changes in relations with NATO are possible in the near future.”

Moscow from now on only talks to the masters – in Washington. After all, the direct line between the Chief of General Staff, General Gerasimov, and NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, General Todd Wolters, remains active. Messenger boys such as Stoltenberg and the massive NATO bureaucracy in Brussels are deemed irrelevant.

This happens, in Lavrov’s assessment, right after “all our friends in Central Asia” have been “telling us that they are against … approaches either from the United States or from any other NATO member state” promoting the stationing of any imperial “counter-terrorist” apparatus in any of the “stans” of Central Asia.

And still the Pentagon continues to provoke Moscow. Wokeism-lobbyist-cum-Secretary of Defense Lloyd “Raytheon” Austin, who oversaw the American Great Escape from Afghanistan, is now pontificating that Ukraine should de facto join NATO.

That should be the last stake impaling the “brain-dead” (copyright Emmanuel Macron) zombie, as it meets its fate raving about simultaneous Russian attacks on the Baltic and Black Seas with nuclear weapons.

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The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!

The world according to Vladimir Putin

October 23, 2021

Russian president, in Sochi, lays down the law in favor of conservatism – says the woke West is in decline

By Pepe Escobar, posted with permission and first posted at Asia Times

The plenary session is the traditional highlight of the annual, must-follow Valdai Club discussions – one of Eurasia’s premier intellectual gatherings.

Vladimir Putin is a frequent keynote speaker. In Sochi this year, as I related in a previous column, the overarching theme was “global shake-up in the 21st century: the individual, values and the state.”

Putin addressed it head on, in what can already be considered one of the most important geopolitical speeches in recent memory (a so-far incomplete transcript can be found here) – certainly his strongest moment in the limelight. That was followed by a comprehensive Q&A session (starting at 4:39:00).

Predictably, assorted Atlanticists, neocons and liberal interventionists will be apoplectic. That’s irrelevant. For impartial observers, especially across the Global South, what matters is to pay very close attention to how Putin shared his worldview – including some very candid moments.

Right at the start, he evoked the two Chinese characters that depict “crisis” (as in “danger”) and “opportunity,” melding them with a Russian saying: “Fight difficulties with your mind. Fight dangers with your experience.”

This elegant, oblique reference to the Russia-China strategic partnership led to a concise appraisal of the current chessboard:

The re-alignment of the balance of power presupposes a redistribution of shares in favor of rising and developing countries that until now felt left out. To put it bluntly, the Western domination of international affairs, which began several centuries ago and, for a short period, was almost absolute in the late 20th century, is giving way to a much more diverse system.

That opened the way to another oblique characterization of hybrid warfare as the new modus operandi:

Previously, a war lost by one side meant victory for the other side, which took responsibility for what was happening. The defeat of the United States in the Vietnam War, for example, did not make Vietnam a “black hole.” On the contrary, a successfully developing state arose there, which, admittedly, relied on the support of a strong ally. Things are different now: No matter who takes the upper hand, the war does not stop, but just changes form. As a rule, the hypothetical winner is reluctant or unable to ensure peaceful post-war recovery, and only worsens the chaos and the vacuum posing a danger to the world.

A disciple of Berdyaev

In several instances, especially during the Q&A, Putin confirmed he’s a huge admirer of Nikolai Berdyaev. It’s impossible to understand Putin without understanding Berdyaev (1874-1948), who was a philosopher and theologian – essentially, a philosopher of Christianity.

In Berdyaev’s philosophy of history, the meaning of life is defined in terms of the spirit, compared with secular modernity’s emphasis on economics and materialism. No wonder Putin was never a Marxist.

For Berdyaev, history is a time-memory method through which man works toward his destiny. It’s the relationship between the divine and the human that shapes history. He places enormous importance on the spiritual power of human freedom.

Nikolai Berdyaev. Photo: Center for Sophiological Studies

Putin made several references to freedom, to family – in his case, of modest means – and to the importance of education; he heartily praised his apprenticeship at Leningrad State University. In parallel, he absolutely destroyed wokeism, transgenderism and cancel culture promoted “under the banner of progress.”

This is only one among a series of key passages:

We are surprised by the processes taking place in countries that used to see themselves as pioneers of progress. The social and cultural upheavals taking place in the United States and Western Europe are, of course, none of our business; we don’t interfere with them. Someone in the Western countries is convinced that the aggressive erasure of whole pages of their own history – the “reverse discrimination” of the majority in favor of minorities, or the demand to abandon the usual understanding of such basic things as mother, father, family or even the difference between the sexes – that these are, in their opinion, milestones of the movement toward social renewal.

So a great deal of his 40 minute-long speech, as well as his answers, codified some markers of what he previously defined as “healthy conservatism”:

Now that the world is experiencing a structural collapse, the importance of sensible conservatism as a basis for policy has increased many times over, precisely because the risks and dangers are multiplying and the reality around us is fragile.

Switching back to the geopolitical arena, Putin was adamant that “we are friends with China. But not against anyone.”

Geoeconomically, he once again took time to engage in a masterful, comprehensive – even passionate – explanation of how the natural gas market works, coupled with the European Commission’s self-defeating bet on the spot market, and why Nord Stream 2 is a game-changer.

Afghanistan

During the Q&A, scholar Zhou Bo from Tsinghua University addressed one of the key, current geopolitical challenges. Referring to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, he pointed out that, “if Afghanistan has a problem, the SCO has a problem. So how can the SCO, led by China and Russia, help Afghanistan?”

Putin stressed four points in his answer:

• The economy must be restored;
• The Taliban must eradicate drug trafficking;
• The main responsibility should be assumed “by those who had been there for 20 years” – echoing the joint statement  after the meeting between the extended troika and the Taliban in Moscow on Wednesday; and
• Afghan state funds should be unblocked.

He also mentioned, indirectly, that the large Russian military base in Tajikistan is not a mere decorative prop.

Putin went back to the subject of Afghanistan during the Q&A, once again stressing that NATO members should not “absolve themselves from responsibility.”

He reasoned that the Taliban “are trying to fight extreme radicals.” On the “need to start with the ethnic component,” he described Tajiks as accounting for 47% of the overall Afghan population – perhaps an over-estimation but the message was on the imperative of an inclusive government.

He also struck a balance: As much as “we are sharing with them [the Taliban] a view from the outside,” he made the point that Russia is “in contact with all political forces” in Afghanistan – in the sense that there are contacts with former government officials like Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah and also Northern Alliance members, now in the opposition, who are self-exiled in Tajikistan.

Those pesky Russians

Now compare all of the above with the current NATO circus in Brussels, complete with a new “master plan to deter the growing Russian threat.”

No one ever lost money underestimating NATO’s capacity to reach the depths of inconsequential stupidity. Moscow does not even bother to talk to these clowns anymore: as Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has pointed out, “Russia will no longer pretend that some changes in relations with NATO are possible in the near future.”

Moscow from now on only talks to the masters – in Washington. After all, the direct line between the Chief of General Staff, General Gerasimov, and NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, General Todd Wolters, remains active. Messenger boys such as Stoltenberg and the massive NATO bureaucracy in Brussels are deemed irrelevant.

This happens, in Lavrov’s assessment, right after “all our friends in Central Asia” have been “telling us that they are against … approaches either from the United States or from any other NATO member state” promoting the stationing of any imperial “counter-terrorist” apparatus in any of the “stans” of Central Asia.

And still the Pentagon continues to provoke Moscow. Wokeism-lobbyist-cum-Secretary of Defense Lloyd “Raytheon” Austin, who oversaw the American Great Escape from Afghanistan, is now pontificating that Ukraine should de facto join NATO.

That should be the last stake impaling the “brain-dead” (copyright Emmanuel Macron) zombie, as it meets its fate raving about simultaneous Russian attacks on the Baltic and Black Seas with nuclear weapons.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!

Nations Built on Lies – How the US Became Rich

October 16, 2021

Foreword, Prologue, Introduction:  This is Part 1 of 6 and will form a complete ebook that will be available for download with part six.

Foreword

From: James Bacque

Date: Saturday, Jan 5, 2019 9:13 PM

Dear Larry

Thanks for the information–as you guessed I have encountered much of it myself already. I wish you good luck . . . Be as moderate as you can in expressing your very important findings. Remember that hardly anyone knows as much as you do and some of your findings are very upsetting.

All the best

Jim

Prologue To Volume One

A Brief History of America That You Won’t Learn in a University

One of the more popular historical myths embedded in the American consciousness by the propaganda machine relates to the migration of settlers to the New World, the narrative detailing how hundreds of thousands of the virtuous oppressed flocked to the dockyards in a headlong rush for freedom and opportunity. There may indeed have been five or six such persons, but a much larger group was there to escape the hangman and jailer and an even larger selection were slave traders, hookers, and budding capitalist scam artists looking for greener pastures. When we add in the vast numbers hoping to escape justified persecution for their perverted witches-brew versions of Christianity, the first Americans were hardly role models for a new nation. The evidence is more clearly on the side of criminals, losers and misfits, religious whackos and opportunists than on the mythical oppressed. And, for the record, there is no evidence whatever of settlers emigrating to America in search of either “freedom” or “opportunity”, at least not within the current meaning of these words.

Good mental health was not a prerequisite for European settlers emigrating to the New World. We are fond of reminding ourselves that Australia was (and mostly still is) populated primarily with murderers, thieves and sexual perverts, but the immigrants to America were not noticeably better. Indeed, the inscription on the Statue of Liberty got the words more or less correct in referring to “the wretched refuse of your teeming shore”. While the Australians had their serial killers and muggers, the Europeans went one better with their Christian extremists who spent their weekdays burning witches and killing Indians, and their Sundays in church thanking God for the opportunity. The Australians have marginally improved their habits over the centuries while the Americans have not.

America is widely accepted, and indeed even prides itself, on being a deeply Christian country, with 65% or more of the population declaring religion important in their lives. This would be supported by history, since the major migrations to the New World consisted of a long list of flaky religious sects whose primary goal in emigration was the opportunity to build a society entirely based on those isolationist and extremist heresies. It is probably safe to say that Salem witchcraft was the seedbed in which the peculiarly American version of Christian theology sprouted and flourished, and which also served as a practical introduction to mass hysteria which would later be so usefully applied to the concepts of patriotism and democracy. The enduring echoes of this religious ancestry have been highly influential in all of subsequent American history.

The Preamble to the American Declaration of Independence (“The most famous words in the English language”, if you’re American; just another Hello Kitty greeting card, if you’re not), states: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all White Men were created superior and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, the most important of which is slavery”. In the recent history of the modern world, only two nations of people have so thoroughly embraced slavery as to have practiced it on an immense scale for hundreds of years: the Christians in America and the Dalai Lamas in Tibet. And only these two groups so cherished slavery in their hearts they fought a civil war over the right to maintain it. It is hardly a moral selling point that both sets of racist bigots lost the war and, while Mao cleaned up Tibet, the racism and bigotry persisted in America, often violently, for another 200 years and is still widely in evidence today. Christian virtue does not die easily.

Internationally, the American government and its leaders function with an absolute amorality, driven primarily by their commercial Darwinism, their law-of-the-jungle, might-makes-right philosophy. Yet individually most Americans accept all this as somehow being righteous and pleasing in the eyes of their god. The vast network of torture prisons, the numerous governments overthrown, the countless brutal dictatorships installed and supported, the commercial and military enslavement of so many populations, the 10 to 20 million civilians massacred, the constant meddling in the internal affairs of other nations, the so-frequent destabilisation of governments, the plundering of the resources of so many nations. All of these are excused, justified, forgiven, often praised, then quickly forgotten by these moral Christians. Americans may be comfortable with all this cognitive dissonance, but as Jiddu Krishnamurti aptly wrote, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society”.

Hypocrisy has always been a prominent, if not quite endearing, feature of Americans, and especially of their government. It is Americans who preach democracy and freedom at home while installing brutal puppet dictators all over the world, who preach free trade at home while practicing savage mercantilistic protectionism abroad. It is Americans who espouse human rights at home while building the largest network of torture prisons in the history of the world. And of course, preaching that human life is precious at home while murdering millions in other nations in trumped-up wars of liberation. It is only Americans who moan about “the appalling loss of 5,000 American lives” in Iraq while killing one million Iraqis, half of whom were children. It is only the Americans who use the CIA, NED, USAID and the VOA to pay and prod individuals in other countries to create internal political dissent, then condemn a government for cracking down on “innocent dissidents”. Maybe one day Americans will lose their stomach for all this creation of worldwide instability and have another American revolution. And not before time.

Most Americans are only dimly aware of their own sordid past, a situation abetted by all the blank pages in the history books. The portions of US history contained in these pages have mostly been excised from the historical memory of Americans because they don’t fit the mythical narrative. Most Americans fervently believe their country was founded on God and Christian virtue, liberty, democracy, human rights and free trade, but when we dig beneath the propaganda and jingoism we discover the United States of America was founded on religious extremism, racism, slavery, genocide, a brutal imperialism and a virulently predatory strain of capitalism.

These volumes contain a capsule history of the United States of America with selections that will not be found in any history book, but that nevertheless consists of facts which are not in dispute. From here, we will look at some specifics, beginning with how America became rich. From this point forward, ideology and reality will be in constant conflict, presenting stark challenges to our uninformed beliefs.

Quiz on American History

a. Which US Secretary of State holds the World Record for being the most prolific baby-killer in recorded history?

b. Which US General holds the World Record as the greatest pathological mass killer in modern history?

c. Fidel Castro listed in the Guinness Book of Records as surviving 638 murder attempts by the US government. For what was he being punished?

d. The father of which recent US President conspired with a group of Jewish bankers and industrialists in 1933, engaging a famous General to amass an army of 500,000 troops to overthrow the US government and install a fascist dictatorship in America?

e. How many times has the US invaded Canada?

f. The US has been a nation for about 245 years. For how many of those years has the US been at war?

g. How many democracies has the US installed in other nations during its lifetime? How many brutal dictatorships has the US installed in other nations during its lifetime?

h. Japan conducted abominable human experimentation in China during WWII – Shiro Ishii’s infamous Unit 731. Why was Japan spared war crimes trials?

i. How many Presidents, Prime Ministers and senior government officials of other countries has the US assassinated for disobedience or obstruction to hegemony?

j. Which country operates the only Torture University in the world?

k. For several hundred years, slave-trading was the highest-paying job in America. What was the second-highest-paying?

l. Which government for about 100 years paid a lifetime salary to any citizen who could steal patents and processes from other countries?

m. Which revered US Supreme Court justice recommended killing off all Americans of low IQ?

n. The government of which country for decades silenced political dissidents by performing frontal lobotomies and turning them into vegetables?

o. Which famous American institution recommended “mercy killings” of the economically unfit, these to be performed in local gas chambers?

p. Which American Defense Secretary gathered 500,000 young men with an average IQ of about 65 and sent them to Vietnam? How many returned? What was his punishment?

q. Which American Military physician appeared before Congress in what year, asking for $10 million to fund the creation of the HIV virus? Did he receive the money?

r. When and where was Coca-Cola was invented?

s. Which famous person invented the incandescent light bulb? Which the telephone? The most famous American inventor was Thomas Edison. How many things did Edison invent?

t. We are told Germany killed some 6,000,000 Jews during WWII. How many Germans were killed in Germany AFTER the end of WWII?

u. Which famous physicist wrote to Roosevelt, offering to fund the entire unknown cost of creating the atomic bomb, stating the funds were already confirmed available?

v. Which famous US President was the illegitimate son of a Jewish slave trader?

w. Abraham Lincoln’s wife was an inveterate opium addict. Who was her opium supplier?

x. In what year was slavery abolished in the US?

y. Which US President exposed tens of millions of US citizens to radiation from open-air atomic tests, then instructed medics to inform women experiencing leukemia, hair loss, miscarriages, that they were suffering from “housewife syndrome”?

z. Which famous shoe did Nike design that set Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman on the road to fame and glory?

Answers

a. Madeleine Albright; Iraq, 500,000

b. Cutis LeMay; about 20 million, give or take

c. Expelling the Jews from Cuba

d. George Bush

e. Five so far

f. 235

g. Zero. More than 50, and counting

h. Ishii and his entire unit were transported to the US to teach Americans the pleasures of live vivisections and other atrocities. Ishii was a Professor at the University of Maryland until his death decades later.

i. More than 150, and counting (including Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary-General of the UN)

j. The US of A; the “University of the Americas” in Fort Benning, Georgia

k. Killing Indians

l. The US of A. Amounts of $20,000 to $50,000, in the 1800s

m. Oliver Wendell Holmes

n. The US of A. (FBI)

o. Carnegie

p. Robert McNamara. Not many, but the Defense Dept. refuses to release statistics. Made President of the World Bank.

q. Dr. Donald MacArthur, Deputy Director, Research and Engineering, Department of Defense. 1969. Yes.

r. The Spanish town of Aielo de Malferit, 40 years before Coke stole the patent.

s. Joseph Swan, USA, five years before Edison stole the patent. Antonio Meucci, Italy, five years before Bell stole the patent. None. All Edison’s patents were either stolen, bullied, extorted or purchased.

t. Between 12 million and 14 million; some by execution, the bulk by starvation.

u. Albert Einstein, funds offered by Rothschild and other European Jewish bankers.

v. Abraham Lincoln; the son of A. A. Springs(tein) and Nancy Hanks. Adopted by the Lincoln family.

w. A Jewish drug dealer named John Wilkes Booth.

x. Slavery was never abolished in the US. It just changed form.

y. Eisenhower

z. The Japanese Onitsuka Tiger. Nike stole the design and began manufacturing in the US. American courts ruled Onitsuka and Nike could “share” the patent.

Introduction to the Series

David Edwards was quoted in the Third World Traveler as having written:

“Even open-minded people will often find themselves unable to take seriously the likes of Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, Howard Zinn and Susan George on first encountering their work; it just does not seem possible that we could be so mistaken in what we believe. The individual may assume that these writers must be somehow joking, wildly over-stating the case, paranoid, or have some sort of axe to grind. We may actually become angry with them for telling us these terrible things about our society and insist that this simply ‘can’t be true’. It takes real effort to keep reading, to resist the reassuring messages of the mass media and be prepared to consider the evidence again.”

This is the condition we face in dealing with America and Americans today: a blind faith and conviction based on a century of clever marketing and nationalistic propaganda that is almost inevitably contradicted by the facts. In truth, there is little about the US today that is not based on fabricated historical mythologies, buried history, biased presentations, facts twisted so badly as to be often unrecognisable. Probably 95% of what Americans ‘know’ about their nation, its history and its conduct in international affairs, is wrong, and often violently wrong. I am not so much concerned with what Americans believe about their own country, but it is a concern that this enormous compendium of historical fiction has been marketed to the rest of the world as truth, with peoples in many other nations believing the same fairytales as do the Americans and holding that nation in a level of regard that is to say the least undeserved, and often dangerous for the absence of truths.

These truths are the content of these books, the history of the US as it really was then and still is today, harsh provable truths and documented realities without the vast comforter of propaganda, jingoism, patriotism and misinformation that blankets the nation we know as the United States of America. Coincident with what is truly an almost incomprehensible volume of rose-tinted misinformation about the US is an equal volume of black-tinted information about the world outside the US. To the same extent that Americans have been subjected to a century or more of positive and unforgivably false propaganda about their own nation, they have also been subjected to enormously false negative propaganda and misinformation about the world outside their borders.

This series of books was to a large extent an accident of circumstance which began with my extended stay in China and the almost immediate realisation that the voluminous negative flood about China persistently emanating from the Western Zionist media was entirely false; demonisation and propaganda at their worst, giving Americans wholly unrealistic and often vicious misinterpretations and misunderstandings about the realities of China. After viewing a decade or more of this onslaught, and after writing many series of articles in attempts to correct some of the more egregious falsehoods, it seemed a book might be a more appropriate format. But then during ten years or more of historical research, it became apparent that Americans had been subjected to an even greater campaign of misinformation about their own nation than about China and other foreign countries.

I then seemed faced with a two-fold task: to correct – in the eyes of Americans, and perhaps Westerners generally – some of the more glaring misinformation about China, but then to correct – in the eyes of Americans – the even more glaring misinformation about their own country. To further complicate the issues, it gradually became clear that the world outside the US had been so contaminated by American historical mythology, jingoism and propaganda that foreigners were largely living in the same fairyland, insofar as the realities of America were concerned, as were the Americans themselves. To add to the confusion, it eventually emerged that the US-based power of the media, of advertising, of propaganda and misinformation, had contaminated not only the American view of other nations but the views of the peoples within those nations – to the point where Russians or Chinese or Vietnamese had been excessively exposed (thanks in no small part to malignancies like the VOA and Radio Free Europe) to both the glorified but false images of the US and the comparatively derogatory but false images of their own nations that had been so heavily propagated by the American government and the Zionist media to their own people. One book thus became five.

These books are intended to provide only a summary of the related topics. Full volumes can, and have been, written on many of the topics in these chapters. We have seen many books on the CIA involvement in narcotics or in Tibet, volumes on the discrepancies in the official 9-11 narrative or the Bush regime torture prisons, others on the various failings of US democracy or the American educational system. But these individual offerings, useful as they are, treat the segments as essentially disparate and unrelated issues where in reality most of them are integral parts of a deeply-connected whole. My purpose in these volumes is to present a unified picture to enable readers to see the entire landscape as a single canvas and appreciate the inter-relationships of the parts. It is this unified image that will provide a comprehensive understanding of world events and the forces driving them.

Preface To Volume One

Almost every individual or family has what we call ‘skeletons in the closet’, a collection of perhaps embarrassing or even shameful events, regrettable actions, unsavory family members, sins we committed that we would rather not confess in public, things we do not dwell on and would prefer to forget, recognition not only of our imperfections but reflecting the reality that we not so much make mistakes as sometimes act with less than honorable motives.

Included in this category are lies that we tell. Many of these are what we call ‘white lies’, usually small avoidances of truth often done for convenience or even a good cause. No doubt all of us lie on occasion, but there are precious few of us for whom lies constitute the foundation of our lives, where we are in a real sense “living a lie”. We occasionally encounter people who lie about their educational credentials or work history, sometimes greatly exaggerating their accomplishments, and in these instances the lies may serve as an important part of the foundation of a person’s life, perhaps obtaining a highly-paid position based on entirely false credentials, a life that would in part disintegrate if all the truths were known. We find this sometimes with con artists, whose very existence seems built on a vast and intricate weaving of lies, with lives that would indeed disintegrate if the truths were made public. These latter people are, in some real sense, “living a lie”.

Moving from individuals to nations, there are a few countries in the world that fit this latter category, one being the United States of America – a nation and a people that are in every sense living a lie, with virtually the entire foundation of beliefs, of actions, of history, of national pride, of citizenship, based on things that are not only not true but constitute an all-encompassing network of fabricated historical myths. This is not an idle claim, and is not an accusation that can be made against many other countries. I know of no place regarding the US where we can look and not find the landscape littered with falsehoods and supported by an enormous scaffolding of myths, half-truths, buried facts, boldly revised history, nationalistic propaganda and magnificent outright lies. It is true that most nations sugar-coat some parts of their history, but the US is almost unique in the world in being a nation that is genuinely built – and almost entirely built – on a foundation of lies.

With most other nations, if all their historical and political lies were fully exposed with all truths openly documented, they would still survive. But for Americans, the existential threat would be unbearable and I do not believe the US could survive as a nation if all its historical truths were unveiled and confirmed, in a manner by which Americans were compelled to confront them as fact, where denial was not an option.

As two minor examples, we have the now well-documented fact that the US government abandoned several thousand prisoners of war in Vietnam, men held back by the Vietnamese pending the American payment of the agreed war reparations of several billions of dollars. The US government had no intention of paying the money and so walked away from the table, leaving the men behind. Many veterans attempted to bring this to public attention, even testifying before Congress; many had unshakable proof of their claims, but the government – and the media – ignored them until recently when all the factual details emerged in second-tier internet news sites and could no longer be avoided. A much greater existential threat lies in the truth of Pearl Harbor, where it is no longer a secret, except to Americans, that Roosevelt knew not only of the impending Japanese attack (which he had carefully and deliberately provoked), but that he knew precisely the location and course of the Japanese fleet and the date and time of the attack. Roosevelt and his aides held back this information from their own high-level military at Pearl Harbor, sacrificing those lives for the greater objective of a “justified” entry into both theaters of the Second World War.

I believe there are almost no Americans with the emotional capacity to face this brutal truth, either philosophically or emotionally, and yet similar evidence virtually floods the available information sources. I would repeat here David Edwards’ words that “we will become angry with them for telling us these terrible things about our society and insist that this simply ‘can’t be true’.” Yet these things have always been true about the American government. It wasn’t so long ago that declassified documents revealed Operation Northwoods, where the CIA proposed to shoot down a planeload of American college students and a US space shuttle launch, using those as justification to invade Cuba and remove Castro. The US government has both proposed and executed dozens of these atrocities over the years, all hidden from the American mind and heart with the compliance of the media. Pearl Harbor was by no means the worst of these, but few Americans will be able to deal with these truths of their nation.

Many other events are perhaps less brutal but no less breathtaking in their dishonesty. All the tales of how the US became rich, the jingoistic mantras of ingenuity and innovation, of wealth resulting from freedom and democracy, hard work and fair play, are entirely false, and repugnantly so. America became rich through a program of organised violence encompassing hundreds of years, through centuries of unpaid slave labor, military invasions, and the bullying and plundering of weaker nations. The propaganda of the benefits of American-style capitalism follows this same pattern, but Americans are fed this pulp from birth and no longer have the intelligence to see the truth. The US government statistics on items like inflation, unemployment, GDP and more, are the most misleading and dishonest of all nations today. The propaganda machine tells us otherwise, but one need only look at the facts. The US has for the last century been the largest perpetrator of espionage in the world, this activity provably including commercial espionage on a grand scale for more than a century, but the propaganda machine lays this accusation on other nations while claiming a desire to collect only information on terrorists. An enormous lie of a magnitude almost too large to comprehend or refute.

Thomas Edison, revered in American history books as one of the most prolific inventors of all time, never invented anything. The stories about him are fabricated historical myths, as are the cherished legends of the Wright Brothers making the first powered flight or Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone. Coca-Cola was a world-famous Spanish product stolen and patented by US pharmacist John Pemberton, with the US government refusing to recognise the prior patents. Tales of American inventiveness and IP are almost 180 degrees from the truth, with solidly documented proof that the US stole more IP from more countries than did any other nation, by orders of magnitude, paying $20,000 to $50,000 to anyone who could accomplish such a theft, at a time when even $20,000 was a lifetime salary for an average person. This pattern is consistent in every area and every field of endeavor in American society. The entire history of the US, as described in the history books and repeated incessantly by everyone from Hollywood to various Presidents, is almost all false, and the parts not false are almost always misrepresented. The nation of America and all of its people, are truly living a lie.

The entire thread of “Democracy” and “democratic values” is one of the greatest serial lies ever told. American history books, and American minds, are filled with tales of the US “making the world safe for democracy” by battling tyranny everywhere and installing democratic governments, but this has never happened even one time. While the propaganda machine was flooding the imaginary world with tales of democracies, the US was flooding the real world with brutal military dictators that would permit US multinationals and banks to pillage their countries. All the theory of the US’ fabled democracy, the government by the people, the checks and balances, is false, with the truth in the open but Americans so indoctrinated nobody seems able to see. Furthermore, the US government has made it illegal to teach many of these truths in America’s public schools.

All the propaganda of moral superiority, of concern for human rights, are, as we will see, lies in their entirety. The US is not only not morally superior, but has the worst human rights record of all nations excepting one, in recent centuries. Americans have many tales – almost all false – of other nations committing wartime atrocities while their own government and military were committing far worse and heavily censoring the media to prevent that knowledge from escaping custody. Almost no Americans know of the vast massacres committed by their military in the Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, Germany and Iraq. Human rights atrocities began from the first days of the white settlers landing in North America, and have never ceased. Ever since the US outsourced to other countries its human rights atrocities, it has boasted to the world of its moral righteousness in human rights leadership, but all was based on lies, deception and marketing. The world’s only “torture university” – the infamous School of the Americas, the decades of cruel and even savage atrocities inflicted on so many of the world’s nations, have been lost in the American propaganda of goodness.

The US heavily promotes its fictitious position as the world’s policeman, but it has never once acted in such a capacity. No nation has ever been protected or defended from anything by the US, but many dozens have instead been ravaged and destroyed by this same imaginary angel of mercy. Everything about the US protecting any part of the world, is an outright lie. American heads are filled with tales of American goodness rescuing these populations from tyranny, but the hundreds of US military interventions have been undertaken to beat down indigenous populations who were rebelling against American imperialism, poverty and death. The US Congressional Record lists these interventions as “protecting American interests” without providing details on precisely what interests were being protected, by what means this “protection” was being inflicted and, most importantly, why America had any “interests” in those nations in the first place.

The US government has not only lied about every war and foreign military intervention, but has most often created false-flag events to accompany the lies and create fictitious justifications for belligerent action. The American entry to World War One was promoted by perhaps the greatest woven tapestry of lies ever created, thanks to Lippman and Bernays, a project that involved literally millions of lies told over a period of years, sufficient to brainwash an entire population into hating an innocent country. The promotion of World War Two was not better in any respect. The Americans have done this since the destruction of the warship Maine in Cuba’s harbor more than a century ago, and have never ceased these enormous self-inflicted injuries. Lies used to justify more lies.

It is now well-known and not in dispute that US officials told more than 900 separate lies to justify the invasion and destruction of Iraq. The same is true with Libya, and with Syria today. The same is true of the destruction of Yugoslavia, another devastating military adventure based 100% on lies. All of the so-called “color revolutions” and other similar were not initiated to protect local populations from dictators but to punish unwilling nations for resisting the brutal American-style capitalism that was ravaging their shores. Ukraine, Russia, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Brazil, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and so many more nations have been under attack by the US government simply for resisting colonisation, but stillborn American minds believe they are God’s representatives pressuring “the bad guys”. Every part of American foreign policy and foreign involvement is covered with a carpet of lies, the media assisting in subversion and burying of the truths.

It would be useful to collect a catalogue of lies told by American presidents, Secretaries of State and other high officials, and publish these alongside the true facts. Consider this statement by George Bush made in 2003, just as his vast international kidnapping and torture regime was running at top speed: “The United States is committed to the world-wide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example. I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture and in undertaking to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment. I call on all nations to speak out against torture in all its forms and to make ending torture an essential part of their diplomacy.” Name one president of any country that has told a greater lie than this one by George Bush.

The US government and its agencies boast to the world about their freedom of speech while condemning censorship in other nations, yet the US is probably the most heavily censored of all countries. The fact that the media are willing conspirators does not change the fact that all news and public content is heavily controlled and that 95% of what Americans “know” about their own nation and the world, is false. The US news media invariably present only one side of events that proselytise the current political agenda, leaving the American people hopelessly in the dark about the true facts. This is so true that one US columnist noted that only 4% of Americans have any awareness of the immense brutality perpetrated on the people of Palestine by the state of Israel for the past 70 years. American history books and other educational materials consist largely of historical myths, propaganda about the goodness of America, about the badness of other nations, lies about the foundation and entire history of America itself. Hollywood is one of the worst criminals in this regard, with virtually every movie containing historical content being little more than a twisted propaganda film, satisfying one ideology or another while totally misleading Americans on the truths of their own nation. Stephen Spielberg’s recent ‘Lincoln’ movie is one such example, but there are hundreds of others.

The US, the one nation in the world stridently claiming an absolute freedom from propaganda, brainwashing and censorship, is in fact and reality the nation most overwhelmed with precisely these attributes. We will see irrefutable evidence that American schoolchildren are exposed to extensive indoctrination virtually from birth in terms of politics, capitalism, consumerism, patriotism, moral superiority, American exceptionalism and so much more. We will see that this indoctrination and brainwashing are so extensive that the American view of itself and its place in the world bear almost no comparison to reality, to the extent that this vast gulf between beliefs and reality constitutes a national mental illness. Given the enormous cognitive dissonance in America today, one can conclude only that Americans are the most deluded people on earth.

And in the end, this is the reason the US Department of Homeland Security has built its 800 detention centers and purchased its three billion bullets, the same reason that many (Western) columnists are openly suggesting that the rampant abuse of power, the entrenched corruption and feeding from the public trough, the persistent plundering and terrorising of nations with civilian casualties in the millions, “has become so widespread, so deeply entrenched and so increasingly bold, that the only possible remedy is a revolution”. American and European columnists are becoming increasingly vocal in actually recommending another American revolution, convinced that only a popular uprising of the population acting in concert would have the power to reverse this tide. Until then, America, unlike almost every other nation in the world, will continue to be a nation built on lies.

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Part Two of Six will contain:  Colonisation, Labor and Slavery

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River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   

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